If Hitler Comes

by Christopher Serpell

  Mallory was less than forty years of age. He stooped slightly, had lank, black hair, and sharp features that were not too prepossessing. It was, however, impossible to deny the lively brilliance of his eyes. He had had a distinguished academic career, had been called to the Bar, and had published an authoritative work on the economics of the steel industry. Rich and well-connected, he had soon found his way into the House of Commons, where he had sat under the quaint banner of National Labour. But he never made his mark in Parliament, for he was an indifferent orator. He had been connected with a number of societies whose aim included a more determined effort at economic planning. He had been useful, during the war, at the Ministry of Supply, though, if the doctors had let him, he would have enlisted.

  He opposed the Peace of Nuremberg, and crossed, with a crowd of others, the floor of the House. But in the months that followed he busied himself with plans of Anglo-German economic co-operation; and the hopelessness of it all must have been borne upon him only by degrees. At any rate, it was some time before he settled down as a confirmed critic of the Government’s foreign policy, acquiring the art of the Supplementary Question, and spoiling a good deal of Sir John Naker’s fun. Not until the Treaty of St. James’s was signed did he look around him and realize, with sickening force, that among the debaters and the arguers, the elder statesmen and those who cried “Ichabod”, he alone, apparently, had received the call to win the British people back to the responsibilities of nationhood. And this, he knew, was not a matter of asking questions in Parliament.

  I first made his acquaintance early in June, when Australia and New Zealand began a tentative approach towards the United States. He sought me out and invited me to lunch at the Reform Club. He wanted to know more about feeling in the Antipodes than the controlled Press could tell him, and he asked me what would be the effect on opinion there if the United Kingdom were ever to renounce her alliance with Germany and face up to the consequences, whatever they might be. The most outspoken anti-German had never before, in my hearing, done more than suggest resistance to further Nazi encroachments, and I sat back in surprise. “The effect”, I could only say, “might be magical, but so would the cause.” “No,” he said. “I am quite serious. It would surely not be miraculous if England were to exert her utmost efforts to throw off a foreign tyranny. Even now there is time.”

  One night a little later he outlined his plan in greater detail to a party of us gathered in his chambers in the Temple. A strong Government was to proclaim martial law, disband the Grey shirts, and put an end once and for all to the deliberate German-fomented attacks on Jews and Socialists. If necessary, this was to be done with machine-guns. Properly executed, the manœuvre might throw the Germans off their balance. They might hesitate and threaten, and in the meantime the second part of the plan could be brought into operation.

  The Navy was intact and so was the small Regular Army of 200,000 men. They should be adequate for the immediate defence of the country from actual invasion, even though the German military missions now knew their organization from A to Z. The real danger was from the air, and here we must rely mainly on passive defence. The air-raid shelters were still in existence, for the preservation of human life, and until the system of wardens could be re-established the police could take over the responsibility of the A.R.P. It took time for air attacks to do any irreparable damage to a country’s organization; and if we made up our mind to it we could proceed quite calmly to this second part of the plan.

  “And what, then, is the second part of the plan?” I asked. “Simply”, he said, “to deport, imprison, or shoot every German policeman in England.

  “Then”, he went on, “the struggle begins and grows. Say what you like, the world would be in the melting-pot again. Canada would be back in the fray once more—what, in such circumstances, could hold her back? The spectacle of such a gallant last-minute fight would grip the world; I think we should hear no more of a revolution in India. And what of the United States? Goebbels has already been foolish enough to show the beginnings of an anti-American Press campaign, and to talk mysteriously of the combined might of the British and German navies. America must see that this is her last chance as well as ours. And so is it Italy’s, and Turkey’s, and Scandinavia’s. Since the overthrow of Stalin there is no chance of a new German-Russian alliance. Once overcome the initial difficulties, and the rest would be easy.”

  Mallory always grew excited as he pictured the pieces of a jigsaw world thus neatly falling into place again. But it was not the mechanics of anti-Nazism that excited him, it was the passion and faith that must first lie behind it. He did not want another war about a map; he wanted to uncover again the underlying moral pattern of human society, which no tyranny could permanently disperse. Ways and means, he thought, lay always at the disposal of a resolute will; and there was an inner rottenness in Hitlerism which would cause its swollen bulk to begin to disintegrate as soon as it was met, at any point, with a determined resistance. The immediate problem was not military or political; as he put it: “If God grants us the courage to raise the sword He will teach us how to wield it.”

  Mallory looked eagerly around the group—composed of some of the unconverted whose loyalty and discretion were unquestioned but whose determination and courage were not. By this time, as I knew, he had formed the nucleus of his movement—a score of men of various callings who were all now busily at work, as he was, preaching the gospel of national self-help. He called them merely Patriots; he formed no party and collected no funds. One of his theories was that of the Fascist Party-State inverted; at the ultimate crisis, he believed, a nation could save itself only by the spontaneous functioning of its natural parts. Given an army and a police force, a civil administration and a labour movement still intact, whose leaders believed in the national cause and could communicate their faith to the rank and file, then, he said, the merest word from some central rallying point would be enough to start the struggle with every chance of success. There were historical instances of this, which Mallory was fond of citing—the Risorgimento, Primo de Rivera in Spain, or (a perverted example) the rise of Hitler himself—and in each of these the inner conviction of the patriots, and not their strategical situation, was the deciding factor. It was morally impossible, according to Mallory, for the largest imaginable foreign force to hold down an unwilling and determined Britain.

  Against this theory someone instanced the apparent powerlessness of the Czechs, who, of all Hitler’s victims, had the reputation of professing the fiercest patriotism. There were the Poles, too, who had preserved their proud national spirit for centuries, without ever succeeding in building a durable State. There were the Finns, who fought the hardest in defence of their freedom, but gave way in the end; and there were the Austrians and the Danes, whose cultural achievements on the fringe of Germania had shown what a purified Teutonism could become, but who had been conquered in a day. The methods of the Gestapo seemed unchallengeable.

  “Only because they have never been challenged,” replied Mallory. “The neighbours of Germany, however great their courage and national pride, have always acknowledged a kind of divine right of German arms. The huge German race was dominant in Central Europe long before it achieved political unity; and this dominance found mystical expression in the theoretical Holy Roman Empire. The surrounding races were part of the German scheme of things, and if that scheme came to involve the establishment, by violence and cruelty, of an immense Mitteleuropa, they felt in their hearts that they must ultimately submit to it. But with ourselves, it is different. We are outside the German system, and we have imperial traditions of our own. Just as Germany is indestructible, so are we. The presence of German policemen on British soil is an aberration of history so monstrous that the smallest effort of will could put an end to it—that is the first thing. But we also have our responsibilities on the Continent, counterbalancing those of Germany. After the war is resumed and won we must see to it that the vassalage of Germany’s neighbours be
comes an honourable and creditable one again, working for the good of civilization as a whole.”

  Mallory was no League of Nations man, or abstract political thinker. He divided the weak from the strong, and knew his Lebensräume. He was not poles apart from the Fascists, and had once contributed an article to Mosley’s Action. In the early days of the Hitler régime, had he had the direction of British foreign policy, he would have gone far to strike a bargain with Germany over respective spheres of influence on the Continent and overseas. He would almost certainly have been accused of belonging to the “Cliveden Set”; and he would not have admitted, until it was proved up to the hilt, that it was both useless and immoral to negotiate with the Nazis. But the time arrived when his conscience spoke, with the single voice of patriotism and Christian justice. Like many others, he came to realize the error of Nuremberg, but, unlike them, he did not despair. He still believed in the politics of power, but he thought the power was as much in British as in German hands. It was latent, but it was there; and it lay in the spirit of the race, co-existent with the race itself, which any resolute political engineer could transform into successful action.

  Much of this seemed to us pretentious nonsense, like Hitler’s or Rosenberg’s; but it is impossible to fight a war without some suspension of disbelief in fallacies about race. Mallory’s best claim on our credulity was that none but he made any attempt to rally us in the defence of the things which in past times we had held dear. At the least, it was surely better to fight for a lost cause than to own no cause at all.

  Mallory, then, set himself to fan back into a flame the damped-down embers of British patriotism; and he would have hit more than the headlines had his little bellows produced anything but the tiniest flicker. But, alas, he failed, or seemed in his lifetime to have failed; and the world, which he wished to save, has still largely not heard of him. He was not a conspirator, but a prophet; and as a prophet he was first unheard, and then, almost casually, silenced. But he never himself abandoned hope, or recoiled for long before his successive disappointments. He died believing that he had started a movement that would sweep on to victory. In the realm of political thought, and in the long run, perhaps he had.

  The former War Coalition had by this time become sadly disorganized. Mallory went to see all the old leaders, whose voices, not long since, had been heard on the wireless exhorting the nation to fight on to the end. They received him, I believe, without enthusiasm, and when he had gone forgot about him, unless they wondered whether he was an agent provocateur. Most of them had already retired from political life. They were lost without their Parliamentary sounding-board, their privileges and their nice rules of procedure; they could hardly be expected, at their age, to take leading parts in the Continental melodrama that now dominated English politics, with its private armies, and strange disappearances, and multitude of spies. “We have lived too long,” was the burden of their complaint, and, as they had played out the game honourably according to the rules, they were entitled to excuse themselves thus. From many a remote country house, its gardens falling somewhat into neglect, Mallory drove despondently back to the village station—not always unnoticed by a man in a high peaked cap lounging near the lodge gates.

  But these lost leaders had sons: were they not picking up the dropped torch? Alas, in their bewilderment, their judgment seemed to desert them. Some of them were frankly with Rosse, irrelevantly hunting the Jews; others responded to Mallory’s approaches with futile plans for minor coups d’état. A small proportion, who might have passed as honourable men in simpler circumstances, were already making their contacts with the German party bosses—giving mixed house parties at home or lending aristocratic tone to the orgies in the Karinhalle. The great majority were helpless and dismayed, waiting to see what would happen next—ready, perhaps, to strike a simple blow for freedom as part of a disciplined revolt, but unable to plan or lead it.

  One of Mallory’s group was a young and not unsuccessful stockbroker. This Mr. C. (his name is better not given, as the Nazis may still have failed to track him down) used to tell some incredible stories about conditions in the City. “We are business men, not politicians,” was the common slogan among those who in other circumstances might have found it useful to become Conservative M.P.s, and this asseveration covered a multitude of strange dealings which trailed the Red Ensign in the dust. The financial outlook was, of course, as black and uncertain as it could well be, and the whole of British foreign trade was in the balance. There was a big field for speculation, and some cause for panic. One fact alone was certain, and that was that the political power in the shade of which financial power must wax or wane lay on the other side of the North Sea. The central finances of the British Empire were already at the disposal of German development in south-east Europe. Dr. Schacht was made an honorary member of the Court of the Bank of England, and it was astonishing how many heel-clicking Nazis were entertained in the battle-scarred halls of the Liveries. C. was decided on this point—it was quite impossible to finance a national revolution in the City of London.

  But it was not so much money that was wanted as influence. What then of the various organs of publicity that a short while ago had been loudly urging on the war effort? The Ministry of Information itself was of course part of the Government machine, which meant that it was entirely at the disposal of the Nazis. They had increased its technical efficiency, and imported into British public life all those devices of propaganda which, crude as they seem to those outside its range, are effective enough on the mark. The wartime heads had long ago resigned, with the better part of their staff, but the vacant places were soon filled with “advisers” from Germany, who knew what they were about. During the war German propaganda had set out to disturb and depress us. It had succeeded, and now a new technique was required. We were to be calmed, reassured, mildly convinced. How skilfully it was done! Every Briton has by this time a deep track in his subconscious mind scored by those endless posters showing the combined might of the British and German empires, busts of Shakespeare and Goethe entwined with laurel leaves, showing, above all, a British and a German workman generously shaking hands and saying, “Nicht wieder—never again.” There is something hypnotic about pictures of workers shaking hands.

  The Alliance propaganda was not confined to posters,. It penetrated every activity of life, and rapidly built up that clever picture, too soon shown to be a dissolving view, of a sort of Viennese honeymoon for Nazidom and its British bride. A painfully forced smile as of that lost easy-going Austria came over the countenances of our cultural invaders; for a brief moment it was Lilac Time. We waltzed, drank duty-free hock, and bought splendid books with baroque title-pages. Strength-through-Joy offered the British worker such tours of the Black Forest as the Polytechnic could never accomplish. The rubber truncheon was for the moment hidden away.

  On the crest of such a wave even Lord Haw-Haw could rise with all his old sublimity. He was now installed in Broadcasting House, whence he lulled the listening public into a belief in a serene and happy future that was being prepared for them behind the scene. At first people were inclined to laugh at him, and the Mallory group rejoiced that the Nazis had made such a psychological blunder as to send him over. But he began to say so many of the nice things which people wanted to believe that it was not long before one ventured to remark, in suburban sitting-rooms, that perhaps he was not such a bad fellow after all. Nevertheless, he went everywhere with an armed escort; and, somewhat later than the time of which I am writing, as he was hurrying across to a taxi in Portland Place, a young Guards officer was thought to have aimed a revolver at him. The officer was shot dead by the Nazi escort; it was the first and almost the only “unpleasantness” of the kind, and it was hushed up.

  Here, then, was a formidable barrier to Mallory’s propaganda campaign. It was difficult to see any way through or round it. The Press was still nominally free, except that it was forbidden to criticize German institutions, but it had abdicated from the
leadership of public opinion. Reuter was nationalized. The most influential newspapers had gone; one does not spend twopence a day to read of prophecies belied or fulfilled. The big provincial dailies gave up national politics, and turned to local and sectional interests. The popular dailies, deserted by nervous advertisers, were swamped by Dr. Goebbels’s People’s Observer, which, though supposed to be a kind of London edition of the Völkischer Beobachter, provided the unthinking Briton with such an attractive substitute for Picture Post, the Mirror, and the Express as no Berliner had ever seen. Some of my Fleet Street acquaintances took jobs on this monstrosity, explaining, of course, that “they were interested in it only from a technical point of view”, in its pictures, or racing news, or dramatic criticism. They were careful to steer clear of Mallory.